Part I: Thomas Nelson Page's Literature of the Lost Cause

When Thomas Nelson Page wrote about
the antebellum South, he recalled his youth on a
slaveholding Virginia Tidewater plantation. The descendant
of generals, governors, and a signer of the Declaration
of Independence, Page had come to believe that the
true South was populated by noble gentlemen, pure
ladies, and devoted servants.

Accustomed to aristocratic superiority over blacks
and non-elite whites, Page found the postbellum struggle
of his people jarring. He also believed that Northerners
had presented a distorted view of the South’s
history and people–meaning the people of his
own class. Through an impressive bibliography of
short stories, poems, novels, and essays, Page set
about to correct this tarnished image. His sentimental
idealizations of the Old South’s plantation
culture contributed to the development of a “moonlight
and magnolias” myth that other writers at the
turn of the century would perpetuate and later
authors such as Ellen
Glasgow would spend decades trying
to debunk.

pba00506Elsket and Other Stories(Charles Scribner's Sons, 1891)

Page was only eleven years old when the Civil
War ended. Yet he had clear, definite ideas about the region’s history and conflict
with the North. He believed Virginia’s Cavalier heritage to be infinitely superior to New England’s
Puritan legacy of religious bigotry and social intolerance. He cast Northern abolitionists as
the great villains, interfering with the South’s domestic tranquility and forcing the region into war.

Page subscribed to the “Lost Cause” image
of the Civil War, extolling the virtues of Southern heroes’ brave fight despite inevitable
doom at the hands of an industrial machine. As the honorable Confederate soldiers returned home,
they faced further challenges from Northern politicians and reformers who made policies based
on ignorance of the true relationship between master and slave. He praised the South’s
better people for courageously counteracting Reconstruction’s
abuses to restore their values. He supported organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and Knights of the
White Camellia for their attempts to restore the proper social order.

pba00519The Red Riders(Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924)

These ideas simmered in Page’s mind while
he pursued his education and legal career and
started a family. Although he did not stay to
receive a degree, Page completed a classical
course at Washington College (now Washington
and Lee University) from 1869 to 1872, when
his hero Robert
E. Lee was president of the school. After
spending a year at the
University
of Pennsylvania, Page completed his law degree
at the University
of Virginia in 1874. He practiced
law in Richmond until 1893.

Page married Anne Seddon Bruce in 1886, but
she died two years later of a throat hemorrhage.
He then wed Florence Lathrop Field, the widowed
sister-in-law of retailer Marshall
Field, on
6 June 1893. That year, the couple moved to Washington,
D.C., where Page dedicated himself to writing
and lecturing on Virginia’s history and
old social order. Page became active in the social
and political life at the Capital, and served
for six years (1913-1919) as ambassador to Italy
under Woodrow
Wilson, a fellow Virginian. He returned to
Hanover County, Virginia, for the last years
of his life,
and continued writing there. His last novel,
The Red Riders, was not yet finished
when he died on 1 November 1922.

pba00512Marse Chan: A Tale of Old Virginia(Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892)

Page’s first publication, “Uncle
Gabe’s White Folks,” appeared
in
Scribner's magazine
in 1873. In the poem, a black narrator tells
the story about
his honorable white masters in the days before
the war. “Uncle Gabe” marked the
debut of devices Page used in many of his writings.
One of them was the use of slave dialect to relay
a story. Another was inclusion of blacks in a
bi-racial plantation “family,” portraying
the servant as dedicated to his master even after
Emancipation.
Other devices Page employed included inter-regional
marriages and the conversion of transplanted
Yankees into consensual
southerners. Literary
scholars label these plot devices as metaphors
for the theme of the South rejoining the Union
and for the North accepting the southern “family.”

These devices featured prominently in the story
that first brought Page widespread attention. “Marse
Chan,” published in The Century’s
April 1884 issue, uses a faithful ex-slave narrator
to tell the tale of a young southerner who died
for the southern cause and placed duty and honor
above all personal gain. “Marse Chan” also
is a saga of unrequited love between its title
character and “Miss Anne,” the gracious
daughter of a neighboring planter. The story
evoked an intense spirit of nostalgia for the
plantation era. The South’s upper class
embraced “Marse Chan” as the defining
description of their antebellum civilization
and made its reading an essential element of
the rituals celebrating their class’s glory,
such as meetings of the United Daughters of the
Confederacy.

Page’s plantation tales remained extremely
popular throughout the 1880’s and 1890’s,
both in magazines and when reprinted in collections
such as In Ole Virginia (1887). Considered
preeminent Virginia classics, the stories
in In Ole Virginia rely
on the dialect voice of docile slaves to relay
idealized stories in the mystical plantation
setting.

Page reinforces the Old South myth in what many
consider to be his greatest novel, Red
Rock (1898).
He contrasts the agony of leading southern families
who lost their plantations to predatory carpetbaggers
with the ex-Confederates’ powerful memories
of an exalted, pastoral past. This novel makes
ample use of the inter-regional marriage device.
Southerners yearning for the restoration of antebellum
order seek to educate their oppressors via romantic
pairings of Yankee officers with southern belles
and Cavalier gentlemen with northern maidens.

pbw01372Social Life in Old Virginia Before
the War(Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897)

Page’s ultimate
goal was the restoration of social order. He sought
to achieve this aim not only via reminders of the
idealized past but also by scolding the postbellum
elite for their abuse of leisure. Page satirized
high society of the New South in his novels Gordon
Keith(1903) and John Marvel, Assistant (1910),
showing his concern over the upper class’s
neglect of its moral obligations and behavior unworthy
of
imitation by the community.

pba00503Among the Camps; or, Young People's
Stories of the War(Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892)

Page produced a number of children's books as well.
Because the Civil War occured during his youth, he
was able to bring a child's viewpoint to the conflict
in his stories. Published first in Harper's Young
Peopleand later in collections such as Among
the Camps, Page's children's stories about the
war feature the same themes and devices as his adult
work. For example, Two Little Confederatesdescribes
a father's heroism, a mother's courage, and the loyalty
of slaves through the eyes of two young boys. Children
also narrate a story portraying the courage of a
noble widow in Two Prisoners. The symbolic
joining of North and South occurs in stories
such as "Kittykin
and the Part She Played in the War," in which the war stops temporarily while both
sides unite to rescue a cat from a tree, and "Nancy
Pansy," in which an innocent young girl brings the
two sides together.

Literary and historical scholars point out that
Page’s
South was finer than any real place could ever be,
but
he satisfied
the
nostalgia
of his readers for what might have been. Page’s
writings joined with that of several of his
contemporaries to create and perpetuate
a romantic image so solid, later writers such
as Ellen
Glasgow found it difficult–though
not impossible–to counteract.